review by chf of fauconnie turner 2002 in ms distibuted rversion(1)

7/30/2019 Review by Chf of Fauconnie Turner 2002 in Ms Distibuted Rversion(1)

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The following is a pre-proof version of a review that appeared as: Forceville, Charles

(2004). Review of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual

Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities. Metaphor and Symbol19: 83-89. If you

want to quote from it, please check the final, published version.

The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities . Gilles

Fauconnier and Mark Turner, New York: Basic Books, 2002, xvii + 440 pages, $35.00

(hardback), $20.00 (paperback, forthcoming).

Reviewed by Charles Forceville

Dept. of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam

Over the past seven or eight years, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turners Blending Theory

has attracted considerable attention from cognitive linguists. In sections of two previous

books (Turner, 1996; Fauconnier, 1997) and in a number of jointly authored articles (e.g.,

Fauconnier & Turner 1998, 2000; Turner & Fauconnier, 1995), the authors explained the

tenets of their theory using examples from a host of disciplines and socio-cultural

environments. The International Cognitive Linguistics Conferences in Stockholm (1999) and

Santa Barbara (2001) featured theme sessions on blending theory, other scholars started to

publish in the field, and Cognitive Linguistics devoted a special issue to blending (Coulson &

Oakley, 2000). Clearly, the authors deemed the time had come to collect and adapt their

material for a state-of-the-art book, and they chose a title raising high expectations.

I have followed the blending theory discussions with sustained interest, but hitherto I

have had mixed feelings about its import and usefulness. These remain after reading the book.

In the following I will try to account for my hopes and disappointments.

The basics of blending theory are fairly straightforward. The underlying idea is that

representations language taking pride of place reveal that people conceptualise by


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constantly integrating information from different domains of knowledge and experience. As

such, there is nothing shockingly new about this, as the authors are the first to admit. The idea

of combining elements of the old to create something novel inspired the principle of the

collage as theorized and practised by Andr Breton and the Surrealists, as well as the montage

theory of Sergej Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and other Russian filmmakers of the 1920s.

But what is new is that Fauconnier and Turner show that such collating, montaging, or

blending does not reflect activities typically undertaken by artists and other creative minds,

but are the bread and butter of everyday thinking. Moreover, they have built an attractively

simple model that allows a range of hybrid phenomena in different media and disciplines to

be analysed according to the same rules.

In the prototypical situation there are two domains, called input spaces, that

contribute information. Each of these input spaces consists of meaningful elements and

relations between these elements. An input space can thus be conceived as a network of

meaningful elements plus internal links between these elements (that is, of a conceptual

semantics and syntax) governed by pragmatic rules. Since some of the elements and some

of the within-space structural relationships between these elements are similar in both input

spaces, a third, more abstract space can be construed, the generic space. The generic space

reflects what the two input spaces have in common and thus enables them to join forces in the

so-called blended space. The blended space comprises what the two input spaces share (as

featured in the generic space), enriched by elements and relations that are unique to each of

the input spaces. The blended space fuses elements and structure from the input spaces on a

conceptual level in a manner that may result in a formal hybrid (as in the name of the famous

language-learning chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky) but need not do so (as in If I were you

.). The result of the blend is an emergent structure, yielding meaning that did not exist as

such in either of the input spaces independently. Often, the new meaning is not simply a result


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of combining elements from input spaces, but arises from merging or elaborating such

elements.

Here is an example from the book (The Regatta, pp. 63-64). In 1853, the clipper

ship Northern Light sailed from San Francisco to Boston in 76 days and eight hours. This still

being the fastest time on record 140 years later, a catamaran, Great American II, tried to do

better by sailing the same trajectory. A newspaper reported a few days before the catamaran

reached Boston that it was, at that moment, 4.5 days ahead of Northern Light. The word

ahead points to the model or scheme of a virtual race taking place between the two boats in

1993. Clearly, the two input spaces of the Great American II and the Northern Light share

many elements and within-space structural relations: they are both boats propelled by wind,

they try to reach their destination as fast as possible, they are subject to weather conditions,

etcetera. It is these shared elements and relations that, by definition, define the generic space

governing both input spaces. But the integration of the two contributing input spaces also

generates new meaning (emergent structure), notably that of a race and the excitement and

rivalry that accompany such a contest.

As such, blending theory provides a useful model for describing how astonishingly

good the human mind is at integrating heterogeneous information in representations. Turner

and Fauconnier deserve credit for showing how such integrations govern a host of phenomena

not usually discussed together: metaphors, counterfactuals (If I were you ), roles (Paul is

the father of Sally), puns (Chunnel as a blend integrating tunnel and channel), and

mathematic calculations. The subdivision of blends into simplex, mirror, single-scope, and

double scope networks helpfully compares various ways in which input spaces can be

integrated in the blend. Moreover, in chapter 6 the authors devote a promising section to the

role of blending in compressions, specifically in compressions of so-called vital relations

such as change, identity, time, space, cause-effect, part-whole, analogy, category, and


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intentionality, concluding that there are canonical patterns of compression over these vital

relations that we will encounter again and again (p. 101). In each case, the blending process

helps elide large, less relevant chunks of semantic information from the different input spaces

in the service of a condensed representation of these vital relationships in the blended space.

One of the problems I have with the book is the number of examples discussed. Of

course proving the validity of any theory or model requires that it is used to describe and

analyse a substantial number of cases, and given the universality claimed for the blending

principle the applicability needs to be demonstrated in widely different fields. The many

examples (given catchy names like the Buddhist Monk, the Bypass, the Debate with

Kant) are mostly taken from real life and real texts, are invariably entertaining and well-

presented, and convincingly illustrate the principle. But since the principle is not that

complicated and new examples do little to deepen insights into underlying patterns of

blending, the number of pages devoted to each example gradually becomes tiresome even

more so for readers who already know them from Fauconnier and Turners earlier work.

Moreover the tone of exalted enthusiasm that often accompanies finding and discussing yet

another example of some sort of hybrid in which conceptual integration turns out to be

the central cognitive operation began to irritate me. By contrast, too little space is devoted to

what, surely, is the heart of the matter:

A theory of human cognitive powers must not only account for the richness and variety

of human innovation but also show how that innovation is guided. We now turn to these

guiding constraints, the constitutive and governing principles of conceptual integration

(p. 310).


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Chapter 16, in which this task is undertaken, turns out to be an elaboration of the earlier

identified compression mechanism in blending processes. More specifically, the principle of

achieving human scale is shown to be the fundamental goal governing compression. The

authors end this chapter with a list of constitutive and governing principles of conceptual

integration (p. 345) requiring further investigation and research. This chapter is one of the

best of the book, but one would have wished for more of that further investigation and

research to have been carried out already here.

Another problem is the unsatisfactory manner in which Fauconnier and Turner situate

blending theory in relation to existing paradigms. Although the authors cite various scholars

who have inspired their work, it is disappointing that they do not dwell more on how their

theory grew out of metaphor theory, specifically the contemporary metaphor theory

fathered by Lakoff & Johnson (1980, 1999). In a metaphor, semantic elements and structural

relations from one domain (the source domain) are mapped onto a second domain (the target

domain) which then is transformed or (re)structured by this mapping. In metaphor theory

terms, that is, a target domain A, metaphorically coupled with a source domain B, yields a

transformed domain A-as-B. A metaphor is thus one subcategory of blends among many

others, but in essence the basic mechanisms of the many-space model was, with different

names, already largely familiar from metaphor theory.

One of the alleged assets of blending theory that is repeatedly emphasized by

Fauconnier and Turner is that it can explain emergent structure. Inasmuch as the blended

space generates aspects of meaning that inheres in neither of the input spaces, conceptual

integration yields something more than the sum of the component parts, and hence clearly has

a creative dimension. That is correct but, again, the notion of novel, emergent features has its

roots in metaphor theory not so much in the book on literary metaphor Turner himself co-

authored with George Lakoff, More than Cool Reason (1987), but rather in Max Blacks


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More about metaphor (1979 [1976]). Black, who acknowledged predecessors such as I.A.

Richards (1965 [1936]) and Paul Ricoeur (1977), is one of the founders of the interaction

theory of metaphor, which as one of its fundamental tenets claims that a metaphorical

statement can sometimes generate new knowledge and insight by changing relationships

between the things designated (Black 1979: 37, emphasis in original). Blacks interaction

theory has often been criticized for being vague and imprecise, but its theoretical aptness and

applicability were convincingly demonstrated by Indurkhya (Indurkhya, 1991, 1992; Gineste

et al., 2000; see also Forceville, 1995). Hence when Fauconnier and Turner claim that

conceptual integration is at the heart of imagination. It connects input spaces, projects

selectively to a blended space, and develops emergent structure through composition,

completion, and elaboration in the blend, they are making a point their book amply shows to

be a valid one, but when they add that this fundamental cognitive operation has not

previously been studied (p. 89), they are, at the very least, exaggerating.

So how far has blending theory progressed since its birth in the early 1990s? I would

say that the current book does not do much more than reiterate at far too great length the fresh

ideas in, say, Turner & Fauconnier (1995) and Fauconnier & Turner (2000) combined. The

Cognitive Linguistics issue in which the latter paper appears contains several others that

stimulate thoughts on blending. So does Grady et al. (1999), which makes pertinent remarks

on the similarities and differences between blending theory and cognitive metaphor theory.

But the level of theorization in the current book is on the whole still rather thin, and for the

theory to develop into more than a useful descriptive tool, a lot more hard thinking is

required. To repeat some points I made in Forceville (2001), it needs to be made clearer what

counts as an input space. Is genre a potential input space? Irony? Hollywood-film style? Is

there a limit to the number of input spaces? If so, what determines it? What conditions or factors


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govern the decision which are the pertinent input spaces? (The start of an answer to this last

question arguably can be found in the Relevance Principle mentioned on pp. 333-334.)

One of the more exciting analyses by Fauconnier and Turner themselves is that of an

American advertisement urging investments in education, showing child doctors about to

perform an operation. That analysis is meant to demonstrate the notion of telescoping time of

blending theory itself, but I also see opportunities for the theory to develop into a tool that will

prove useful for the analysis of pictures and other multimodal representations, in a manner

analogous to what I have attempted to do with metaphor theory (Forceville, 1996), a big

advantage of blending theory over metaphor theory being that it can cope with more than two

input spaces. (An equally big drawback is that it has fewer constraints.) Many difficult questions

will have to be addressed, such as how, in the case of non-verbal input spaces, these are to be

categorized and named, and what consequence this naming has for the analysis and evaluation

of the blend as a whole. Teng & Sun (2002) and Engelhardt (2002) provide challenging starting

points for pondering applications to visual representations.

If the blending model is to gain greater scholarly prestige and currency, links with

other models and paradigms, absent or only fleetingly referred to in the present book, will

have to be specified and explored. One can think here of expanding the connections with

Sperber and Wilsons relevance theory, which emphasizes the roles of communicator and

addressee in the negotiation of messages and hence of blends. At present, Fauconnier and

Turner approach blends in a predominantly textual manner, but uptake is governed by many

pragmatic factors (relevance is always relevance to an individual, Sperber & Wilson, 1995:

142ff.). Similarly, the notion of language use being fundamentally a joint project between

communicator and addressee (Clark, 1996) is a pragmatic factor pertinent to blending theory

concerns. It seems to me, furthermore, that links with narratology must be explored. Blends

such as the Bypass are mini-stories, and a notion like telescoping time is familiar from


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narratologys distinction between fabula or story (denoting the real time duration a

sequence of events supposedly has taken to unfold) and syuzhet or discourse (the

condensed or elliptical representation of this duration; see e.g., Bordwell, 1985: chapter 6).

The mixing of narrative perspectives (surfacing in Fauconnier and Turners example If I

were you ) is one of the fundamental concepts in narratology, where it often goes by the

name of focalization (as in Elizabeth would be damned if shed go on living like this,

which blends narrators and characters text in so-called free indirect discourse see Bal,

1997: 50).

In short, the book does not live up to the high claims its title and somewhat self-

congratulatory tone suggest. It provides an applicable descriptive model, (too) many

examples, and an intriguing outline of how the many-space model can be deployed to sketch

the similarities between cognitive operations hitherto understood as different. The next decade

or so will make clear whether blending theory theorists and practitioners can resist the

temptation of merely adding to the pile of case studies, and instead work on identifying in

more detail pertinent blending procedures and tease out theoretical implications of the

blending model.

Acknowledgment I thank Alan Cienki for his useful comments on a draft of this review. The

responsibility for the opinions expressed in it, however, rests solely with the author.

REFERENCES

Black, M. (1979). More about metaphor. In: A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp.

19-43). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bal, M. (1997). Introduction to the theory of narrative (2nded.). Toronto: University of

Toronto Press.


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Bordwell, D. (1985). Narration in the fiction film. London: Methuen.

Clark, H.H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coulson, S., & Oakley, T. (Eds.) (2000). Conceptual blending. Cognitive Linguistics 11:

3-4 [Special issue on blending theory].

Engelhardt, Y. (2002). The language of graphics: A framework for the analysis of syntax

and meaning in maps, charts and diagrams. University of Amsterdam: Institute for Logic,

Language and Computation. ILLC Dissertation Series 2002-03 [http://www.illc.uva.nl].

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (1998). Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science

22, 133-87.

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2000). Compression and global insight. Cognitive

Linguistics 11, 283-304.

Forceville, C (1995). (A)symmetry in metaphor: the importance of extended context. Poetics

Today 16, 677-708.

Forceville, C. (1996). Pictorial metaphor in advertising. London/New York: Routledge.

Forceville, C. (2001, July). Blends and metaphors in multimodal representations. Paper

given at the 5th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Santa Barbara CA, USA.

Gineste, D., Indurkhya, B., & Scart, V. (2000). Emergence of features in metaphor

comprehension. Metaphor and Symbol 15, 117-135.

Grady, J., Oakley, T., & Coulson, S. (1999). Blending and metaphor. In: R.W. Gibbs, Jr.

& G. J. Steen (Eds.), Metaphor in cognitive linguistics (pp. 101-124). Amsterdam/

Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Indurkhya, B. (1991). Modes of metaphor. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 6, 1-27.

Indurkhya, B. (1992). Metaphor and cognition: An interactionist approach . Dordrecht:

Kluwer.


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Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its

challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books.

Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Richards, I,A. (1965 [1936]). The philosophy of rhetoric. New York: Oxford University

Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1977). The rule of metaphor: Multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of

meaning in language. Trans. by R. Czerny et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nded.).

Oxford: Blackwell.

Teng, N.Y., & Sun, S. (2002). Grouping, simile, and oxymoron in pictures: a design-based

cognitive approach. Metaphor and Symbol 17, 295-316.

Turner, M. & Fauconnier, G. (1995). Conceptual integration and formal expression.

Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10, 183-204.

review by chf of fauconnie turner 2002 in ms distibuted rversion(1)

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